Guest Blog: Covering the gap - Parents in insurance and long-term savings need more than policies

by Helen Cowan, Founder and CEO of Tall Wall and Tall Wall coach, Dr Kirsty Reynolds

Can working parents, especially women who are often the primary carer, thrive in the insurance and long-term savings industry? Perhaps the more pertinent question in today’s equity fatigued environment is, “how can organisations benefit by helping working parents to thrive?”.

Here’s why:

1. Since a significant number of employees in the industry are over 40, we can assume that a substantial proportion of the workforce have dependent children and many more will have broader caring responsibilities. That’s a lot of people who are potentially not thriving, perhaps not being the professional, nor the parent, they want to be. Can the industry afford to not support and get the best from this population? ¹

    

2. Comparably low female representation at senior levels is linked to parenthood. According to the ABI’s 2023 Diversity Data Collection, women make up 46% of the overall workforceof manager level roles. But at executive level, representation drops to 32%. ² It is no coincidence that many women will become mothers at the point of peak potential in their careers and it is said that “more women will run into the maternal wall before they hit the class ceiling”. ³

    

3. ABI members will know all too well that the industry is struggling to attract and retain the next generation of talent. ⁴ It seems likely that amongst the things young people don’t like the look of, they conclude that it is probably hard to be a successful working parent in this industry. Why would I want to build a career in insurance when I could veer towards equally high performing sectors that have demonstrated a slow but positive shift towards diversity over the last 10 years - law, accounting, consulting, for example?

    

4. The evidence for how diversity and inclusion bolster the bottom line, are numerous and well-documented. Companies with ethnically and culturally diverse boards are 43% more likely to experience higher profits…. companies in the top quartile for executive gender diversity were 25% more likely to generate greater profits… the mountain of evidence goes on. Ensuring all talent can thrive, including parents, is simply good for the bottom line. ⁵

    

For an industry that is built on managing risk, being slow to respond to the changing demands of the workforce means the insurance and long-term savings sector is surely facing massive exposure from this.

How firms can better support parents

There is no perfect solution. Being a working parent in a demanding industry is never going to be easy, but firms can attract, retain and promote working parents by responding to the three most common issues we see amongst parents we coach in the industry: 

Challenge 1: Poor line manager support

When an individual becomes a parent, the single most important work relationship they now have at this junction is with their line manager. It is not an overstatement to say that the quality of this relationship absolutely dictates how well that individual will go on parental leave and how smoothly they will transition back into the workplace post leave. In our work in the insurance industry, we see that line managers typically have good intent but make two fundamental mistakes: 

1. They make assumptions about the individual’s career ambitions and what is “best” for them. We recently coached someone who was told by her very supportive and well intentioned line manager on their return that she had been taken off a client account. The line manager had assumed that the demanding nature of that particular account would be an unfair burden for them so soon after their return. This was not how the newly returning and still ambitious woman saw things.
2. Line managers don’t know how to communicate so they often prefer to say nothing for fear of “putting their foot in it”. This causes confusion and encourages the individual going on leave to in turn make their own untested assumptions. In our research at The Tall Wall, 57% of professional parents interviewed said they wanted their line manager to simply be more proactive in asking them what would make their return a success. 41% would like a better balance between formal HR conversations and more informal, friendly dialogue with their line manager during parental leave.

Potential solutions we have seen work well:

• Set out a proper communication plan for line managers before, during and after leave, giving both the manager and the individual the opportunity to have open and supportive conversations at these critical transition points. Set this as best practice and entrust HR to make sure this is implemented – every time.
• Provide short, pragmatic training workshops for line managers to help them step into the shoes of a working parent. We frequently run group sessions for our clients, as well as 1:1 coaching in some cases. Our line manager “crib sheet” is easy to follow. If you do nothing else, do this.

Challenge 2: Barriers to flexible working

Flexible working is a perennial challenge for all high performing industries, but especially insurance and long-term savings, where networking and entertaining out of office hours is still commonplace. 

Three ways approaches we have seen work well here:

• Encourage senior leaders to normalise being a working parent. We can’t tell you how powerful it is for a parent in your organisation to hear someone more senior to them being vocal and unapologetic about how they are starting late or leaving early to accommodate their responsibilities as a parent. Going for the jackpot, encourage more men in particular to speak up so that flexible working is not seen as something that only women with children do.
• Decide what really matters in terms of output. This one, again, needs to come from the top as it is about culture, as much as anything. What is the work that needs to be done and what are the ramifications if this is not done in the standard hours? We see parents working incredibly hard to fit everything in, going above and beyond to deliver. Most parents will bend over backwards to log back on after the bedtime routine to make up the hours and deliver what they promised. How problematic is this arrangement in your firm – and why?
• In our work as consultants, we see time and again how many people dislike late night entertaining and a heavy drinking culture –it is rarely just working Mums, but increasingly also Dads and young people who really don’t buy into a long hours culture. If we assume this may the case in your organisation, how might you experiment with different ways of networking and entertaining? One law firm we work with gave an entertaining budget to its female Partners with the explicit ask to do things differently – the ideas and the business development that came off the back of this were extraordinary.

Challenge 3: Maintaining career trajectory

For many, parenthood comes at a time when an individual is well established in their career and on the brink of moving to the next rung in the ladder. And so, for many of the people we coach, stagnating professionally is a major concern. If a parent takes a year of leave this often translates to their career being set back two years, accounting for the need to ramp back up and undo some of the well and not so well-intentioned assumptions made about them, as set out above. This means that parents often experience a “wilderness” few years where they feel they are treading water and their career is going nowhere, even though they continue to be ambitious and hungry for more. The questions we often ask organisations we work with is, “why would you employ someone to then not get the best out of them?”. This doesn’t make commercial sense.

Potential solutions we have seen work well:

• The impact of parental leave on a parent’s career, particularly women, is at the forefront of their mind. Therefore, make it “front of process” when it comes to managing parental leave. In our experience the best way to do this is to ensure that line managers are much more cognisant of how to approach career conversations and do this proactively. Also, from a process perspective, consider department pipeline meetings being moderated by HR or a senior “second pen” from another part of the business. This ensures assumptions are challenged when identifying promotion candidates. 
• Since career trajectory is a major challenge for most parents, offer 1:1 executive parental coaching to key populations who you want to retain and promote. This has two benefits: 1) it supports them by offering a confidential space to think through the actions they want and need to take through this transition in order to be the best they can be; 2) crucially, it signals that you are investing in that individual, want to retain them and recognise that becoming a parent is typically the biggest transition of someone’s life.

In our experience, if the insurance industry truly wants to retain and empower working parents, it must move beyond policy and tackle the cultural gaps—starting with better line manager support, clear career pathways, and flexibility that actually works.

If you want to hear more about how working parents can thrive in insurance and long terms savings, join Dr Kirsty Reynolds and Helen Cowan from The Tall Wall for ABI webinar 'Driving gender equity: The role of parental leave in the insurance and long-term savings industry' on 10 June.

 

About The Tall Wall

The Tall Wall is a specialist coaching firm in the professional and financial services industry. Its purpose is to support organisations to create the conditions for all talent to thrive and it has been designing and delivering parental coaching support for 8 years. As well as parental coaching, The Tall Wall delivers executive coaching programmes for senior leaders to help them perform to their potential, and it is a leading provider of consulting on the topic of gender equity in financial and professional services.

References:
1. Source: https://www.postonline.co.uk/news/7956076/make-up-of-the-insurance-industry-in-2024-revealed

2. Source: https://www.abi.org.uk/news/news-articles/2024/12/diversity-improving-overall-in-the-insurance-and-long-term-savings-industry/

3. Source: https://www.allbrightcollective.com/edit/articles/more-women-will-run-into-the-maternal-wall-before-they-hit-the-glass-ceiling

4. For more details, see:  https://www.lifeinsuranceinternational.com/analyst-comment/uk-brokers-talent-crisis-insurance-industry/

5. Source: https://www.edume.com/blog/workplace-diversity-statistics